About us

Renaissance Learning began in 1984 when Judi and Terry Paul started the company in the basement of their central Wisconsin home.

Today Renaissance Learning is a world leader in cloud-based assessment, teaching, and learning solutions with over 950 employees and customers in over one-third of U.S. schools and more than 60 countries worldwide. Hellman & Friedman acquired the company in 2014. And while many things have changed over the years, our mission of accelerating learning for all still burns ever
so brightly.

View our history.

Our Mission

“Our primary purpose is to accelerate learning for all children and adults of all ability levels and ethnic and social backgrounds, worldwide.”

Our Education Principles

We believe that education is a basic human right, and that, given the right approach, virtually everyone can be a successful learner.

The initial step in accelerating learning is to measure its occurrence.

The acceleration of human learning is an inherently social process requiring feedback information, positive
alignment of human purposes, and challenge.

Teachers are important and key to improving schools.

The best way to free people to pursue their own purposes is to help them become literate.

Reading is the foundation of academic skills and critical thinking.

Extensive practice is necessary to develop the skills of reading, mathematics, and writing.

Numbers you can count on.

Tens of thousands of U.S. schools are using Renaissance Learning tools to accelerate learning.

Our enterprise-class data center hosts the data for more than 46,000 schools.

Nearly 64 million STAR assessments were completed during the 2014-15 school year.

On average, more than 2 million AR Quizzes are passed each day.

Our database houses reading records for more than 11 million students at more than 36,000 schools.

Over 400 studies have proven Renaissance Learning tools are effective—more than 70% of which were conducted by third-party evaluators.

On average, we answer customer calls in 8 seconds or less and chats in 3 seconds or less—more than 130,000 calls and 187,000 live chats in 2015. 0 calls or chats are answered by a machine.